Client/server network environments have become ubiquitous. It is routine today for client computing systems to connect over a network to file storage resident on a server. There are also many different computing architectures and platforms being used in today's computing environments.
Competition among network hardware and software providers drives them to offer more and more sophisticated services in conjunction with their products. For instance, simple backup and file restore capabilities are becoming a common offering. Today, many network servers offer the ability for a user of network storage to roll back the state of the storage to the way it was at some previous time. This ability makes simple the act of remedying lost data in the case of some unforeseen accident that falls short of a hardware failure. For example, a user of a network system may one day realize that a file on his server has become corrupted, or for some other reason would simply like to revisit the state of his files at some prior point in time. Volume shadow copies (also called “snapshots”) are used today for specifically that purpose. Volume shadow copies are essentially a view of the state of a volume at some earlier time. Volume shadow copies have become a common mechanism for rolling back the state of a volume. Throughout this document, the terms volume shadow copy and snapshot may be used interchangeably.
One drawback of existing server technologies is that to access a volume shadow copy in a client/server environment, the snapshot must be mounted at the client machine. This procedure typically requires a user to be logged into the client machine with sufficient privileges to mount a volume, which may typically require administrative privileges. The convenience of volume shadow copies is diminished if a user must locate an administrator or other user with sufficient privileges each time he desires to access a snapshot.
Another drawback to these technologies is that mounting a different volume to expose each shadow copy of a share tends to pollute the namespace. In other words, if multiple shadow copies of a shared volume are mounted, the user may be confused by having several different versions of what appears to be the same volume.
An adequate mechanism for exposing shadow copies of a shared volume to clients in a networked environment has eluded those skilled in the art.